Table of Contents

Tutorial: How to install Aircrack-ng on La Fonera

February 12, 2007
By: SonicvanaJr

Introduction

To start off the Fon, or La Fonera router is a small wireless router that is sold to the customer at a relatively low price ($30) provided that the user agrees to connect the Fonera to their internet connection, and provide free internet to those who want it.

The Fon company seems to live to give their routers away for free sometimes.

I have personally seen, and taken advantage of three different instances where they have given away routers.
So if you're broke, or cheap. Just wait around for their next “have a router on us” event :)

The device itself is based on the Atheros AR2315 chipset.

Characteristics:

5V @ 2A power supply

1 ethernet jack

RP-SMA antenna connector

serial port

16MB RAM

8MB Flash

SPI-Bus

The Fon is able to run the OpenWRT Kamikaze image, and can thus run various pieces of software that are ported to it. Including the Aircrack-ng suite.

Power Adapter(s)

Over the past month of so I have fabricated various power supplies for the fon, since a power outlet is not always available.

Since it runs on five volts the options to power it are almost limitless.

So far I have build a car power adapter, USB power adapter, and a power adapter that uses two 9V batteries.

The car, and 9V battery adapters both used a 5V voltage regulator available from Radioshack. Part number 276-1770

Basically this takes an input voltage up to 35V, and drops it down to 5V. However since the laws of science apply in our world the lost energy has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is out of the regulator in the form of heat, so in layman's terms these get VERY hot after a bit of use.

For the USB adapter it was as simple as connecting ground to ground and positive to 5V+ on the USB cable.

I'm not going to go into wiring specifics since all of it is VERY basic stuff, however if you need help feel free to contact me.

Installing

The first step to get Aircrack-ng running on the Fon is to get the OpenWRT image on it first.

Please note to be able to do this you either need a Fon that has SSH enabled.

Tutorial/Guide here. This only works on Fons with firmware 7.0 r4 or below, though at the time of writing [2/12/2007] these people claim to have a way to enable SSH on newer firmwares.

If your Fon is not capable of being SSH'd into then you can use a serial console to flash the image as well.

Instructions for building your own image, and various other bits of information about the Fon and OpenWRT can be found here

First pull the SVN trunk and packages from the OpenWRT SVN server

cd ~

svn co svn://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/trunk/ trunk

svn co svn://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/packages/ packages

You can then later update either of those by going into either the trunk or packages directory, and typing

svn up

Setup and build the image

Go into trunk/package directory and create a symbolic link from the packages tree to the trunk/packages directory

cd ~/trunk/package

ln-sf ../../packages/*/* .

Now go into the trunk directory, and type

cd ~/trunk/

make menuconfig

Make sure that “Target System” is “Atheros AR231x/AR5312 [2.6]”

(X) Atheros AR231x/AR5312 [2.6]

Make sure the Aircrack-Ng package is selected in the Network section as a module.

Disclaimer

You can potentially break your Fon router, though there are various ways to fix it, if you mess up flashing your basically SOL until someone figures out, and documents how to connect a JTAG cable to the Fon and read and write to it. That being said, if you break your router it is your own fault and no one else's. Know what your doing before you attempt this

Now you need to flash your Fon with the OpenWRT image. There are two ways to do this currently, one is to use the serial interface on the Fon, and the Redboot boot loader to flash a image, or you can ssh into the Fon and flash via the OpenWRT shell.

However in the ssh guide replace the files they use with the one I provided, or that you have built. If you built them substitute their wget commands with scp commands to get your image files into the /tmp directory.

Once you have successfully flashed your Fon boot it up, and ssh into it. Default login “root”, password “admin”

Now you need the aircrack-ng and libpthread ipk files. They can be found here or if you built them you should have no problem getting them over to your fon at this point.

Use the command

ipkg install<file name here>.ipk

for both of the files.

You now have the Aircrack-ng suite working on your Fon.

Also note that you need to use the wlanconfig tool to create a monitor mode interface.
I suggest putting this into a script, and then putting said script into your PATH so that you can setup a monitor mode interface quickly.

wlanconfig ath create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode monitor

Enjoy

If you need help I can be found in the Aircrack-ng IRC channel.

Ready to use images

However, if you're lazy, or just don't feel like you can do this you can download the image files at this site